Before I address myself to the recent post by Bill Sheeran (#92), those
members who have access to a local university and would like a readable
introduction to chaos theory in the human sciences might be interested
in the following paper:

I here reproduce the abstract: "Chaos theory has successfully explained
various phenomena in the natural sciences and has subsequently been
heralded by some as the new paradigm for science. Chaos and its
concepts are beginning to be applied to psychology by researchers from
cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology. This paper seeks to
provide an overview of this work and evaluate the application of chaos
to psychology. Chaos is briefly [and well, AD] explained before
existing applications of chaos in psychology and possible implications
are examined. Finally, problems of applying chaos are evaluated and
conclusions drawn regarding the usefulness of chaos in psychology".

Although it might seem to some that the 'application to psychology' has
little relevance here, Susan Ayers' treatment embraces freewill vs
determinism, the mind-body problem, neuroscience, and cognitive
psychology to name just a few topics mentioned in this forum. The
generality of chaos beyond just the 'natural sciences' is discussed,
including the problems of applying it to human behaviour. This
discussion is rather pertinent to a small number of contributions made
earlier this year by Dennis, Bill Sheeran, and myself.

> Science has nothing at all to
> say about the quality of time. In fact, time has hardly any relevance
> at all for science. This is why they are able to cling onto their
> doctrine of reproducible results. It doesn't matter when an experiment
> is done, or repeated. It could be six months later. Time is not
> relevant.

Fortunately this is becoming less true, although I agree that science
has a long way to go. I have often pondered the relationship between
experimental outcomes and the time they are done, and this year I noted
the start times of 54 discussions conducted during my group research. I
have yet to set up the charts, but it may be interesting.

OTOH, I note that my experiments reproduced the effect observed in
hundreds of other studies over the last 38 years in numerous countries
and with numerous populations. With the possible exception of what must
be quite general outer-planet effects, this appears to establish some
degree of time-independence. Or if not time-independent, it may
highlight certain regularities in the large-scale form or organisation
of behaviour, regardless of major differences at the detail level, such
as have been well demonstrated in chaotic systems.

> One of the main drifts of my own work is that astrology has no meaning
> until it is considered in terms of a specified context. Such contexts
> are almost limitless, in that they include anything which can be said
> to begin.

Yes, the some-time interest of the 'hard' sciences with nomothetic
(universal) law has meant the exclusion of context, or its effective
exclusion by specifying transformations that 'correct' for context.
(Allied with this my supervisor, Guerin, recently pointed out that
Western cultures are generally concerned with establishing universal
'substitutibility', so that by and large a Westernised New Zealander
could exist in any other Westernised setting in the world. Thus again,
context is rendered unimportant).

The situation is somewhat different in the comparatively marginalised
'soft' sciences. I understand behaviourism has always held that context
is everything, and certainly most of the social sciences either have
taken or are now taking essentially the same view. That the notion of
'environment' has not yet been extended to the planets may well be, as
Bill and others have suggested here, just a matter of time.

> When science starts to seriously research the relationship
> between consciousness and time perception, astrology will be seen in a
> new light (and probably be given a new name).

Yes. Somewhere in these pages I have written about this, I think
earlier this year. If I correctly understand what Bill is implying,
then the related ideas that Dale and I have been advancing are relevant.
Although I am not a cognitive psychologist (although I frequently seem
to end up tutoring in the field), I have used the term 'cognitive' for
where I think a planet/human interface is to be found. In effect, our
perception and hence our 'reality' - including our perception of time,
and our memory, or present, remembered and future events - is structured
by the time-cycles of the planets.

Although this does not address concerns part of the Exegesis group has
with the influence of astrology in non-human areas (Bill listed some of
them in #92, such as geophysics and weather), we need to remember that
the distinction between human and non-human reality is unclear. As we
*are* the measuring instrument of everything we know and do, although we
sometimes delude ourselves into thinking otherwise such as when we
consult an externalised instrument of some kind such as a gauge, it can
be argued that there is nothing that is not ultimately psychological or
cognitive.

A company, building, or "race" horse, for example, are outcomes of a
context and history of *human* actions. Anyone who highlights a
building or company (or a horse) in such a way that it becomes the
subject of a chart is doing so from a *human* subjective or perceptual
concern. If a company "fails", a building "collapses", or a horse
"loses", these are not happening to the company or building or horse,
but to the humans who constructed the 'context' or reality in which
these behaviours and events are interpreted and these terms have meaning.
In short, we must be wary of bringing hidden objectivist assumptions to
our discourse.

Postscript to Bill Tallman, #95: You are quite right Bill! My own
increasing theorisation around the cyclical idea is at odds with my own
use of the Sabian Symbols, to my increasing embarrassment! But I am
nothing if not pragmatic < g > . But it is absolutely true that we must
not hide from anomalistic aspects of astrological experience.

As a matter of fact, those of us who insist on cycles still require the
notion of a reference or anchor point. Transits for example require
that the person somehow "knows" that Venus is upon the birth location of
one's Mars. Memory for seasonal context will not do of course, because
only the Sun corresponds (and then not perfectly) to the seasons. So
when a planet returns to its "birth position" or aspects another birth
position, in what sense has it "returned". Unless there is some
validity to the zodiac and the notion of degrees or some similarly sized
unit, the only way around this impasse is to abandon the zodiac as a
reference point and think of cycles *only* in terms of successive
conjunctions between the planets.

> Astrology is not
> an exact science, and will not be validated using the techniques of
> exact science. Statistical analysis is a very weak tool when it comes
> to studying astrology, as it requires an homogenous group of
> individual bits of data in order to come up with any information.
> Astrology, being concerned with the qualitative uniqueness of time,
> and the interface between this and an infinite diversity of contextual
> factors, does not lend itself easily to this kind of analysis. You'd
> need several hundred identical horoscopes and their associated stories
> in order to do the work properly. This is hard to engineer.

I rather largely disagree with this, although the gist of it
(Astrology's concern with the qualitative uniqueness of time) is
something I argued myself for years! Unfortunately, as I tried to point
out earlier this year but probably unsuccessfully, astrology's
uniqueness is an illusion. Astrological knowledge is *social* (or
socialised) knowledge. It cannot be otherwise, for in truth if all
moments and all persons are unique, then the only honest astrologer
stays mute before her/his client, as there is nothing that can be *said*
through the *social* medium of language that does not instantly defeat
uniqueness. In other words, astrology is not different from the social
sciences in the knowledge gathering techniques it must use (if we are
talking about doing it through language, sharing of experiences, or
reason; that is, if we are talking).

Point by point:

Being in a quarrelsome mood, I take issue with Bill's opening sentence
(although he may well have not meant is as pendantically as I am about
to take it, so apologies in advance). I doubt that there is any such
thing as an "exact" science, or that there are any "techniques of exact
science". Chaos has already rather dented these notions. But that
aside, exactness is a human convenience, nothing more. We say something
is "exactly right" when we mean it is good enough for our purposes. What
meaning this has in the universe is unclear, beyond our knowing, and as
a species we appear to have little interest or cause to be interested in
what it means outside our own convenience. That being the case, then
astrology is exact when it is good enough for our client, and it is not
exact, or even plain wrong, when it isn't good enough. An identical
situation once arose in debate between the hard and soft sciences, and
in the "physics envy" of some psychologists; but the distinction was
always an illusion, and the cause of much time-wasting.

Whether "statistics is a very weak tool [applied to astrology]" is
something I hope to address in the next few months. Bill appears I
think to be talking about the 'between groups' design, but there are as
many designs and techniques as the researcher has the ingenuity to
invent. The key issue, when statistical techniques are involved, is to
select and/or calculate the correct distribution, and in astrology this
will not generally be the 'normal' or 'Gaussian' distribution. (For
example, Venus does not spend most of its time in Leo say, with a
rapid fall off in time spent in signs to either side). Fortunately,
thanks to the "exact" science of planetary calculation, we are in a
position to produce these distributions with little difficulty.

It is the *strength* of statistics in the social sciences (SS) that
makes its use promising in astrology, as SS confronts a similar
situation to astrology; to wit, the influence of context or the
simultaneous presence of numerous (possibly limitless) factors. Given
good study design, statistics is a tool that is able to "single out" the
effect of one factor (or up to three factors as the current practical
limit) from the confusing pattern produced by these other factors.
(There is an assumption about the validity of 'random sampling' which is
supposed to account for these other factors, and about which astrology
may have something to say, but I have addressed this before and will not
reproduce it here).

Because of the complexity and subtlety of human behaviour, those that
argue that astrology had an empirical basis in observation over
centuries or millenia must credit that astrological influence produces a
large number of *gross* effects. Small and medium effects, as they are
called in psychology, would have been unobservable because of the many
other influences at play. (I don't discount, indeed I take seriously,
the notion that behaviour and the mirroring astrological models were
considerably simpler in the past; this would mean that only gross
effects were sought). The opportunity now is that we can perform studies
of small effects too, and so decide subtle but theoretically critical
questions (as if we don't have enough *large* questions to decide!).

It is sometimes argued that group designs cannot be applied to astrology
because for example one person's Venus in Aries is not the same as
another person's Venus in Aries. This is because of (a) *astrological*
chart differences (highlighted by Bill); (b) non-astrological
differences, such as culture, society, socio-economic status and so on.

This is nonsense!

I have argued that astrology (as it is practiced and discussed) is a
socialised knowledge. An indicator of this is that Venus in Aries has
standardised meanings that can be looked up in numerous texts
(adapted according to the writer's cultural and circumstantial milieu,
admittedly). Even though no professional astrologer will ever reproduce
a standardised text, or fail to take into account other astrological
(and also hopefully biographical) factors, the fact is it is *this* kind
of sharable, linguistically formulated knowledge that forms the
foundation of our interpretations.

A similar situation applies to personality testing. In some cases,
these tests nearly equal the astrological chart in the number of
dimensions they contain, their sophistication, and their ability to show
that "no two people are the same" (examples are Gough's California
Personality Inventory, the MMPI, and Cattel's 16PF). Yet their empirical
basis is the group design.

Thus, it would be *possible* to assemble a group of people with Venus in
Aries, and another with Venus in Virgo, if one thought one might obtain some
kind of between-group difference (effect size) with the measures one has.
Any astute astrological researcher however would doubtless be more
inclined - based on astrological 'theory' - to assemble groups where
slightly stronger differences (effects) might be expected: for example,
Venus dominated by 'hard' aspects versus Venus dominated by 'soft'
aspects; or hard Venus versus hard Pluto. As astrological (and indeed
psychological) theory expects greater individual differences (effect
sizes) to arise as one adds further discriminating factors, one can
constitute one's groups as specifically as one is able practically to
do.

The problem for astrologers, as for social scientists, has been
obtaining adequately sized samples from sufficiently dispersed
populations. The development of personality tests (truly useful ones)
is or has been an enormously expensive process, and this is why after 60
years of the principles being well understood there are still only about
six with some generality. The situation has now changed however, thanks
to the internet. Although I don't see any immediate need for
"identical horoscopes", even this may become possible with
expanding populations and increasing intercommunication.

The point is not that statistics is "weak" in this situation; rather it
is strong. And finally, it is not in the support or non-support for an
often necessarily limited and even puerile hypothesis that statistical
findings are fulfilled, but in their ability to point directly to the
rich *qualitative* data of what people actually said, felt or did in the
particular study. The philosophy of the "multi-methods approach" is
that the best studies are those that *combine* statistical or
quantitative and qualitative techniques.

> The specific subject of discussion here is the practice of "divination",
which is very different from psychological profiling that is the approximate
limit of most modern astrology. Divination is about prediction: it seeks
answers about the future from the realm of the divine. It does not seek,
nor does it yield, nebulous psycho-spiritual aphoristic advice or arcane
truths sufficiently removed from our earthly lives to be of safely debatable
nature. That it seems so is the result of the difficulty in getting a
divinatory form to speak "plain English (substitute appropriate language
here...)" In short, the purpose of divination is to gain insight into that
which has useful application to the future. The deep understandings of the
present and past that we are accustomed to labeling as the proper realm of
divination are recent adaptations, but the same definition applies. It will
be in the future that we will use that understanding and it will be its
applicability there that is of primary concern... or should be, I suggest.

Allow me to toss some small change into this expensive pot. Surely any
clearcut distinction between "prediction" and (if you must) "nebulous
psycho-spiritual aphoristic advice or arcane truths" crumbles beneath
the principle of "character is destiny" and its implications. At best the
two (knowledge of specific outcomes or knowledge of causal factors) are
opposite poles of the unified phenomenon that is astrological,
or for that matter scientific, or any kind of explanation. The idea that
there is
a component of astrology (including horary, and even tarot, I Ching, etc)
that is purely predictive, is simply superstitional, and pertains to outcomes
which are remarkable precisely because of their rarity.

The history and literature of oracles (and the two cannot be separated) exists
almost entirely to teach the foolishness of believing in prediction. Cassandra
who is fated never to be believed, or Tiresias who reveals that the answer
is within
the asker.